Mavericks

by Craig Alanson

  What saved the Ruhar’s life was a combination of Derek opening the flap, Irene’s knife creating a hole that required nanobots to rush there to seal the rip, and the raft’s fabric getting caught on the underseat mechanisms that snagged and tore more rents in the fabric. Between those three sources of tears in the fabric, the raft began to sag and within seconds, collapsed as the argon supply was exhausted. At the point, the Ruhar who had nearly had his neck snapped by being forced against the cockpit ceiling yelped again, because the seat lurched down and forward. The force of the raft inflating had broken the brackets under the seat, snapping it free of the floor and it fell and sagged forward, bashing Charl’s face against the instrument panel. “Help!” He called as the significant weight of the seat itself had him trapped, his furry nose squashed against a display screen.

  “Irene,” Derek grunted as he stood up and tried to lever the heavy broken seat backward, “I could use some help here.”

  Irene stuffed the knife back in her boot before she stood up. The last thing they needed was another hazard cluttering up the cockpit floor that was already covered with billowing raft fabric and jagged broken bits of the seat attachment mechanism. With the two humans pulling and the Ruhar pushing as best he could, they got the seat awkwardly pulled back far enough so Irene could reach around with one hand and release the seat straps. Freed from the seat, the Ruhar lost no time in squeezing between the seat and instrument panel, rolling onto the floor in an undignified manner. Blood streamed down from his nose and he moved his head stiffly, holding it to one side.

  “Is your neck stiff?” Irene asked with genuine concern. “Here, let me take off your helmet, the weight can’t be good for your neck.”

  With the helmet off, the Ruhar gingerly moved his head side to side and back and forth, testing what range of motion he had. “Nothing broken,” he announced with a glare toward Irene, and her mouth went dry as she imagined what the Ruhar would say to the accident investigation team. Somehow, the almost fatal incident was going to be her fault and in a way, she agreed with that conclusion. She was in command of the aircraft, so anything that happened aboard was her responsibility. Charl was going to say she should have warned him not to pull the handle to inflate the raft, as if she had ever imagined anyone would or even could be that incredibly stupid!

  As suddenly as the Ruhar’s intense glare bored into her, that expression was replaced by what Irene knew was sheepish embarrassment, unmistakable even though the body language was on an alien face. “We could, um, ha ha, keep this to ourselves, I hope?” The Ruhar asked, laughing nervously.

  Irene looked around the disarray in the cockpit, at the torn fabric of the raft, the snapped and twisted pieces that had secured the seat to the floor, aand the smear of blood on the display screen. The Dodo would need to be taken off the flight line and back to a hangar to have the seat replaced and the airframe inspected for damage. No way could anyone conceal the incident. And then she realized something; Ruhar flight recorders captured everything that happened in a cockpit, voice, video and sensor data. That recorder would show the accident investigators that she warned the Ruhar not to screw around under the seat, but he had ignored her. Greatly relieved, she stepped backward through the cockpit door, waving the Ruhar to follow her and offering a hand so he didn’t trip over broken parts littering the floor. “Sir, what matters is that you are not injured, that we can see. You should be examined by base medical personnel, to assure you do not have internal injuries.”

  “Ah, ha, ha,” Charl swallowed hard, knowing he was going to be in big trouble. “Thank you, I-rene, Der-ek,” he pronounced their names slowly. “I will see that you are assigned another airspace craft. Your quick reaction to the,” he searched for a word that would not further embarrass himself, “unexpected incident, is much appreciated. You have demonstrated your skill and mastery of this craft, I do not need to accompany you up to the ship,” he gave her a weak and sheepish smile. Then he waggled a finger accusingly. “That raft should not be capable of being inflated while it is still attached to the seat! I must speak with the manufacturer of that system!”

  “I agree completely, Sir,” Irene nodded with sympathy. “What if the system deployed on its own and caused the pilots to lose control? Battle damage might also cause the raft to inflate at the wrong time. We will add a note to that effect in our squawk list, Sir.”

  An hour later, with the Ruhar at the base hospital and the Dodo having been towed back to a hangar, Irene was filling out accident report forms on a tablet while she talked with Perkins via zPhone. “Yes, Ma’am, I think that Ruhar is going to be just fine. His pride is hurt more than anything. The hamst-” she caught herself from using the derogatory slang while in earshot of aliens at the airbase, “Ruhar here are anxious to get us away, Derek is on the flightline checking out our replacement ship now.”

  “The ship you were supposed to fly, is it damaged badly?” Perkins asked anxiously. A minor incident could be mostly swept under the rug, with the airbase maintenance team quietly replacing broken parts. But if the airframe had sustained damage and the dropship needed to be pulled out of service for an extended time, the incident could cause a big stink that senior Ruhar would be eager to blame on ignorant humans who should not be allowed to fly in the first place.

  “No, Ma’am,” Irene reported happily. “The crew chief told me this is the damnedest thing he’s ever seen in all his years, and even he didn’t think it was possible for a raft to inflate while still under a seat. This may lead to a new safety regulation.”

  “Great, as long as nobody ever says we humans are the cause of needing to idiot-proof something.”

  “I think all the Ruhar here at the base would very much like to pretend this never happened. Soon as these forms are completed, I’ll help Derek preflight our new bird, and we should be up there with only a seven-hour delay.”

  “Seven hours?” Perkins asked, surprised and dismayed.

  “Yes, Ma’am, the cruiser’s orbit has taken it away from us, so our next good launch window is not for a couple hours,” Irene explained patiently.

  “Goddamit,” Perkins cursed with exasperation. “Why isn’t the future like Star Trek where you never have to think about the reality of orbital mechanics?”

  “I’ll get right on that, Colonel,” Irene laughed.

  “Can you launch now? I don’t give a shit about your fuel consumption.”

  “We could, yes, it’s not normal procedure-” Irene started to explain.

  “To hell with normal procedure, then,” Perkins cut off her pilot’s explanation. “Tell them you are practicing combat rendezvous maneuvers, whatever bullshit you want to call it. I’ll get it cleared with their air controller. I want you in the air ASAP, before the hamsters change their minds, or some higher-ups decide they need a full investigation. That cruiser is not waiting for us, it will be leaving whether we’re on it or not.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Irene agreed with enthusiasm.

  “Striebich,” Perkins’ voice softened. “We dodged a bullet today. If that Ruhar had been seriously injured or killed, the hamsters wouldn’t care that it was his own stupid fault.”

  “You’re right, Colonel. He could have been killed. A couple more seconds,” she didn’t need to finish the thought. Right before Derek had ripped open the tab to deflate the raft, the Ruhar had been pressed up against the ceiling, his neck at an awkward angle. Irene had feared her passenger was already dead at that point. Of all the crazy, stupid things that had happened during her flying career, someone inflating a raft inside the cockpit was beyond not only her experience, it had been beyond her imagination. “Win ugly?” She suggested.

  “Win ugly? All right,” Perkins sighed from the heavy weight of responsibility. “I guess you can’t argue with getting one in the ‘W’ column. Damn it, if anything goes wrong out there, we are not getting a pass from our patrons.”

  “We all understand that, Colonel. We are all doing our best.”

  “That’s
not good enough. I don’t mean to be a hardass, Striebich, but we need to consider not only what will go wrong but what could go wrong.”

  Irene didn’t think she would ever have considered a life raft to be anything that could be a threat, but she didn’t want to argue right then. “Captain Bonsu and I still have three combat traps each to perform after we get back from the cruiser, Ma’am.”

  “Traps?”

  Derek gave Irene the side-eye because she used pilot slang too often around non-pilots. “Flying a dropship into a docking bay,” Irene gestured the action with her hands, “until it is caught, or ‘trapped’, by the emergency restraint system. We need to perform three traps at high-speed to qualify for spaceflight duty. That’s where our focus needs to be right now.”

  “Understood. You did well, Striebich, you and Bonsu. I’ll see if I can smuggle some debriefing fluid upstairs with me, so we can celebrate when the two of you are carrier qualified.”

  “Are you nervous, Captain?” Jesse asked, noting the pilot had been tugging at a lock of her hair as she studied whatever was on her tablet. “Flying up to the cruiser should be a piece of cake for you, right? It’s no different from you docking with one of those practice platforms in orbit like you’ve been doing.”

  “Thanks, Jess-Sergeant Colter,” she had been about to use the first names they’d gotten used to during their unauthorized and informal service together, but switched to military protocol when she caught Perkins with the corner of one eye. “It is different. Those big docking platforms don’t have real live people aboard who could get hurt if we screw up. And they’re designed to get bumped into, the cruiser is not. The real problem is, for us to get carrier qualified,” she used the US Navy term rather than its awkward Ruhar equivalent, “we each have to get three successful combat traps in a Dodo, unassisted.”

  “Uh, combat traps, Ma’am?” Jesse asked, confused.

  Irene used one hand to illustrate a dropship coming into a starship’s docking bay. “Usually, docking procedures are done slow and careful, hands-off. We fly close to the ship and the docking bay’s control system takes over, flies us into the bay nice and easy. That’s what happened on our first flight up to the cruiser two days ago. If the docking bay system can’t sync with our onboard AI, the AI can fly us in by itself, but that leaves a single point of failure, so we also practice manual docking. A Dodo dropship isn’t huge like a Whale transport, but those docking bay door openings look awful tiny when you’re approaching. We practiced the manual procedure for docking while we were up there.”

  “I can imagine that,” Jesse agreed. “But, again, you’ve done that already.”

  “What we haven’t done yet is manual combat traps. In action, a starship wants to recover birds quick as possible so they can jump away. Again, usually we rely on automated systems, but you can’t always count on them working in combat. So Captain Bonsu and I have to fly a high-speed approach into a docking bay. If we miss, or fly in too far,” she smacked one hand into the other.

  “You want us to fly up there first, put a tennis ball on a string from the ceiling of the docking bay, so you know how far to pull in?” Dave suggested jokingly.

  “That would be great, Czajka,” Irene tilted her head and frowned at Dave. “That tennis ball trick works great to park a minivan in a garage. But we’ll be flying a dropship the size of a Boeing 777 airliner, coming in at four hundred feet per second. Just to approach, we have to shoot through a tiny gap in the ship’s energy shield, and there will be simulated explosions going off to distract us, because that’s what happens in real combat. As a bonus, some of the flight systems will be disabled or will drop offline as we approach.”

  “Hell, Captain, that sounds dangerous,” Jesse observed, his face turning pale.

  “Nothing bad can really happen, unless we royally screw up. The control system will take over if we’re going to crash, but we don’t want that to happen. This first time, we will get five attempts to dock, and we need three successful traps out of five. They’re going easy on us because we only had a month of training. When we get out there,” she gestured toward the sky and beyond, “they’ll be running us through exercises continuously, and eventually we’ll need to hit the mark successfully every time, or they’ll wash us out.”

  “If our pilots wash out, we go with them,” Perkins warned. “The Ruhar view the Mavericks as a team, they’re not splitting us up. No other unit wants just the four of us soldiers as a spaceborne infantry team.”

  “All for one, Ma’am?” Shauna suggested.

  “And one for all,” Perkins finished the saying. “The only good news I know of is this cruiser will have a bunch of flight cadets who will be burning eager to show they can do what experienced human pilots,” she pointed to Irene and Derek, “can’t do. I expect some of those nuggets to crash and burn, and that will give us breathing room for a couple minor slip-ups, if we don’t crash a dropship or lose someone out an airlock.”

  “Yeah, Dave,” Jesse winked at his friend.

  “Me?” Dave asked defensively. “What you lookin’ at me for?”

  “I figure if one of us gets blowed out an airlock by mistake, it ain’t gonna be me,” Jesse winked to Shauna.

  “Hey,” Dave thumped his chest. “When we were in Kachako,” he meant the city in Nigeria, “I’m not the one who fell out the window of that cathouse-”

  “Whoa!” Jesse waved his hands frantically. “Nobody needs to hear that sordid tale right this minute.”

  “Cathouse?” Shauna asked, arms rigidly folded across her chest. “Like a brothel?”

  “Uh, yeah, we were searching the place for insurgents,” Jesse shot a pleading look to his comrade in arms.

  “We actually were,” Dave admitted. When Shauna gave him a skeptical look, he folded like a rug. “Well, we did find insurgents there, kinda unintentionally. It was Bishop’s idea. That’s when ’Pone went out the window.”

  “That guy had an AK!” Jesse explained. “It was either I go out the window or get an ass full of seven six two rounds. Anyways,” he wanted to avoid discussing that subject any further. “Let’s not talk about that now. Captains Striebich, Bonsu, best of luck to you going up to the, what’s that ship’s name again?”

  “It’s the Ruh Tostella,” Derek explained.

  “Tostella?” Dave laughed. “What’re the odds we won’t call it the Toaster?”

  Even Perkins had to chuckle at that remark. “Just don’t call it that when the hamsters can hear you. I don’t think they go for giving nicknames to their ships.”

  “Now that your team has qualified for spaceborne duty, HQ has a going-away present for you.” Bezanson picked a bag off the floor and took six mugs out, setting them on the table. “The Ruhar cranked these out for us. The logo is our idea.”

  Perkins picked up a mug. It was solid like a ceramic coffee mug, but lighter than Styrofoam, and the handle folded so mugs could be stacked. Printed into the olive-drab exterior was a logo Perkins had not seen before. It read ‘EX FORCE’ on top, with ‘Anytime. Anywhere. Any fight.’ below. A yellow star with a swoosh separated the two lines of text. “Uh, Ma’am, this kind of looks like a logo for a minor league hockey team.”

  Bezanson laughed at that. “HQ is not exactly stuffed with marketing experts, this is what the Big Five could agree on.” Before the Expeditionary Force left Earth, there had been attempts to agree on a single motto, but talks had fallen apart and mottos were not considered a priority, so each of the five nations had their own logo and motto. The US military’s contribution for an official motto was ‘Taking the fight to the stars’, which was universally agreed to be totally lame, but no worse than the mottos of the other four nations. Naturally, the troops came up with their own mottos, especially after the force realized their task would be peacekeeping on Paradise. ‘Rent-a-grunts’ was one unofficial motto, along with ‘Mall cops to the stars!’ and ‘Will work for food’. Bezanson thought that last one was entirely appropriate. “HQ wanted something that s
ounded fierce. Perkins, this,” she tapped a mug, “is for a morale booster here on Paradise.”

  Perkins looked at the mug with skepticism. “Anytime, anywhere, sure, but, ‘any fight’?”

  “Because we never know what crazy shit we’ll get into next, and we won’t back down.” Bezanson was pleased to see Perkins nod determined agreement. “HQ did a survey of soldiers who chose to remain in the force, and over seventy percent of them cited the actions of your team as a major motivator. Your Mavericks proved humans can be useful in the war, that we might have a purpose out here beyond growing food and surviving. Colonel, this is important. We need to give the force a mission out here or there won’t be an Ex Force. We’re hoping after the Mavericks come back, the hamsters will allow other teams to go offworld.”

  “Any fight? General, with the crazy shit we’ve had to deal with, I think ‘Any Fight’ is absolutely appropriate. The Yellow Team commander of the wargame reminded me that his people never know what planet they might be fighting on next, they don’t even know whether the atmosphere will be breathable. So, yeah, ‘Any Fight’ describes the attitude we must have.” Perkins thought Colter and Czajka would lose their minds when they saw the coffee mugs, because in her experience, young male soldiers loved macho shit. Scratch that, she told herself. Sergeant Jarrett was totally going to love it. Probably Irene, too. Derek Bonsu was the one who might worry that having ‘Any Fight’ as a motto was just asking for trouble. Well, what the hell, finding trouble was why they were going to the stars anyway. “I’d like to say we’ll keep in touch, but-”